Author: Ronald Weihs

  • GritLit

    GritLit is the annual Hamilton literary festival. For years I didn’t go, for a number of reasons, but the most compelling one was that I was busy running Artword Artbar. Well, that’s over now, so now I can go. I was impressed. It was consistently really interesting, the authors smart, their answers candid and to…

  • Beautiful Scars at Aquarius

    We parked the car and headed to Theatre Aquarius to see Beautiful Scars, the Tom Wilson musical. A woman passing by stopped to talk. “You’re one of those Theatre Aquarius types.” (I think it was my new hat.) “You’re going to see Tom Wilson.” I said yes. We chatted. “Tom Wilson is the most honest…

  • The pandemic is the medium

    When it started, I thought the interruption would be short. Life would revert. We’d get back to the headlong insanity that we called normal. A year has passed, and that once-vivid world is just another memory. Like university. Like that summer vacation, when you couldn’t wait to go back next year. Like Humphrey Bogart saying…

  • Atom Egoyan’s Guest of Honour, at the Playhouse

    Poster for Guest of Honour. David Thewlis. Atom Egoyan’s new film, Guest of Honour, was shot mostly in Hamilton. Last night, masks in place, we saw it at the Playhouse Cinema. I am a great admirer of Atom Egoyan’s films. Yes, they are dark and brooding. Yes, they drift and ramble. I’m okay with that,…

  • Limits to Common Sense

    Today’s Hamilton Spectator (September 31, 2019) has an opinion piece by Matthew Lau in praise of economist Milton Friedman, founder of the “Chicago School” espousing the virtues of unrestrained free market capitalism. He cites two of Friedman’s ideas, which he treats as obvious: “nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.”…